


Astragaloi (a cast of the bones)

by CyanideBreathmint



Series: The Fox and the Wolf [5]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Epilogue, M/M, Post-Canon, Spoilers, don't blame me blame hamartia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 22:16:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5643823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens after the end of all things.</p><div class="center">
  <p>---</p>
</div>Content warning for graphic character injury and descriptions of said.
            </blockquote>





	Astragaloi (a cast of the bones)

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, ok. I wrote this one because Hux seized the microphone in my head and started dictating. 
> 
> Also, I may be a bit overly brutally realistic with what's supposed to happen to someone when they get shot by an angry Wookiee with a bowcaster that shoots plasma-wrapped quarrels made out of high explosives, but hey, I also rationalized how Ren survived that in the epilogue itself, so yeah.

General Hux wasn’t sure what he was going to find when he left the conference room, Snoke’s instructions cold and heavy in his chest and head. Panic, probably. Order breaking down as everyone stationed on Starkiller Base realized the planet’s imminent self-destruction and trampled each other in a bid to evacuate. 

Fools. Hux would have cursed the Resistance, cursed their sabotage, cursed the traitorous fool who had brought their shields down from within, but he did not have time for all that, and he only cursed Kylo Ren internally as he walked swiftly to the hangar, to the command shuttle reserved for his use. 

“Find Kylo Ren,” Hux said to his waiting aides as he embarked. “Use the tracker signal.” 

“General, Sir,” Captain Serra said in acknowledgement as the loading ramp retracted itself. He waved her away absently and stared out a viewport, watching as the planet shivered and died in its final seizures. All that political capital, all that power, years of his life gone. If he had been more honest with himself then he would have admitted to wanting to stay on the base until it imploded about itself and turned into a new star. That would still have been less of an ordeal than what was to come next – the internal inquiries, trials for failure, all those sharpened knives aiming for his now-exposed back. And another part of him wanted to stay for his failure, stay and die honorably instead of running like a coward and leaving his soldiers to die. 

But General Hux was nothing if not loyal – and the Supreme Leader had told him to find Kylo Ren – find him and return him for further training. So he did.

\---

The tracker signal led them to the woods near the damaged oscillator. Sharp-eyed Major Vay, Hux’s chief aide, spotted him first as they crunched through the melting snow, dodging falling branches and fresh new gullies torn into the ground under the snow.

“General Hux, sir! I see him,” Vay had shouted over the increasing roar of the planet’s death throes. He pointed at a smudge of something dark that looked oddly tiny near a massive crevasse – a smudge that soon resolved out of optical illusion to reveal Kylo Ren lying very still in a distressingly large pink-stained patch of snow, his eyes open and unseeing, and Hux stifled a cry at the sight of him unmasked, burned, his robes soaked with blood. 

“Good work,” Hux told Vay. The hem of his greatcoat dragged in the snow as he knelt down beside Ren, felt at the hollow of his neck for a pulse and found it, weak, thready, irregular. “Get him clear. Take him with us, and signal Medical aboard the _Finalizer,_ ” Hux ordered, “Tell them to prepare to receive a critical case and to meet us in the hangar bay.” 

Captain Serra unfolded a collapsible stretcher, pulled it out to its full dimensions while Vay and junior aide Lieutenant Nalie moved Ren carefully onto it. Almost as an afterthought, Hux shrugged off his greatcoat and tucked it carefully over Ren as they strapped him in; unable to explain to himself why he had bothered. Ren’s blood left a trail behind them as they carried him back to the shuttle, drops of red spreading, fading to a dilute pink in the melting snow as the planet died beneath them.

\---

General Hux was no trained medic, but it didn’t take one to know that Kylo Ren’s injuries were severe at best, and that their issue medpacs were completely inadequate to address the shock, blood loss and hypothermia, let alone the penetrating trauma to the upper left quadrant of his abdomen. Ren struggled weakly as Lieutenant Nalie applied careful pressure to his gut wound, and Hux had been forced to take his hands and hold them down so that his aides could work on first aid.

Hux had seen Kylo Ren deflect blaster bolts with his lightsaber, stop them completely with the strength of his mind alone, and he wondered what could have caused this. What, exactly, could have distracted Ren enough that someone could have shot him? 

Hux thought of the traitor FN-2187, and then of the scavenger girl, and he would have snorted in derision if he had not been trying to hold Ren down. Neither of them could have surprised him, Hux knew. 

“- killed him – “ Ren gasped weakly, deliriously through chattering teeth, and Hux could only wonder who Kylo had meant. The traitor? 

“Good,” Hux said, more to be reassuring, to keep Ren awake more than anything else. 

“s’not –“ Ren whispered brokenly, and then sobbed feebly, once. “Dad,” he said, and then those dark eyes started to roll back into his head as he lapsed back into semi-consciousness. Hux paid his delirious ramblings no mind. 

“E.T.A to the _Finalizer,_ three minutes,” Captain Serra said. 

“Good,” Hux breathed. It would not do for the Supreme Leader’s disciple to die now, not when they had just retrieved him, and Hux had no illusions about what exactly would happen to him if Kylo Ren managed to die on the way back to the _Finalizer._

\---

Major Vay had contacted the staff in Medical as ordered, and a trauma team of nurses and physicians had gathered to meet General Hux and receive Kylo Ren as they disembarked from the command shuttle. The medics moved Ren onto a gurney, and they worked swiftly, efficiently around him as they wheeled him towards Medical, dosed him with stim-shots to keep his heart beating, vasopressors to improve his plummeting blood pressure. Hux trotted along behind them as a nurse popped a pack of blood-replacement fluid, watched as another nurse took Hux’s bloodstained greatcoat off of Ren while they cut his robes off to treat his injuries. The medics left the coat in their wake, and Hux slowed to pick it up, stopped following them as they dwindled down the hallway.

“Sir,” someone said at his elbow, and he turned to see another medic. She looked at him, glanced at the blood drying on his gloves, on his uniform. “Are you wounded, General, Sir?”

“No, thank you,” Hux said, “This blood isn’t mine. Dismissed.” 

“Yes, sir.” She saluted him crisply and then turned briskly to follow the other medical staff back down along the hallways of the _Finalizer._

Hux sighed after she had left, long and slow and heavy as he stared down at the dark stains in the heavy gaberwool of his coat. Those stains would never wash out.

\---

Hux had had the time to shower, rest, change into a fresh uniform when the comms console in his room pinged softly with yet another alert – news from Medical that Kylo Ren had come out of surgery alive.

The full tally of his injuries was rather impressive. Plasma burns, mostly, a couple full-thickness ones that had reached bone. That penetrating gut wound. Surgeons had pulled a half-dozen fragments of high explosive quarrel from his abdomen before stitching his guts back together and closing the wound.

High explosive quarrel fragments. Ren would have been shot with a Wookiee bowcaster, then, Hux mused. It had been a minor miracle that Ren had not died then and there, his insides painting the walls around him when he had been shot. Hux thought again of how Ren stopped blaster bolts with the Force, wondered if that was how he had prevented the quarrel from detonating inside him. 

Hux exited his quarters, and the staff and Stormtroopers aboard the _Finalizer_ granted him a wary, respectful bubble of space as he walked down its hallways. It was only natural – they were still uncertain of his mood and the reprisals to follow the loss of Starkiller Base. Hux thought darkly about his future prospects, and what would happen to him once he had delivered Kylo Ren to the Supreme Leader, thought of penning a last missive to be found in his personal effects in the case of his assassination or execution. 

Then he squelched the thought. It wasn’t as though he had anyone who would be willing to read his letter. His mother, perhaps, but she would fall in line with his father and disavow him if it had indeed been his failure that led to the destruction of Starkiller Base. The family had a reputation to preserve. 

He walked down the hallways to Medical, ignored the staff who chose to ignore him, too, and stepped into the intensive care unit. A quick query granted him the information he sought, and he quickened his pace as he found the room Kylo Ren was currently in. The door opened automatically as he neared it, and he stepped into cool, dim darkness and the syncopating beeps of medical equipment, stepped up to a faintly lit bacta tank in the center of the room. 

There, suspended, a dim shape in the viscous liquid, hung Kylo Ren like a specimen in a jar of preservative. His dark hair curled and swirled extravagantly about his head like seagrass in an estuary. Even in the dim light Hux could pick out the synthflesh dressings against Ren’s pale skin, the ugly line of surgical sutures holding his belly shut. A ventilator hissed, slow and even as it fed the breath mask secured around Ren’s face. 

“You need me,” Hux whispered softly to Ren as he put his gloved right hand up to the glass of the tank, caressed Ren’s face indirectly, “I know you do.”

 _I need you too,_ he did not say. _Stay with me._

In the depths of the tank, Kylo Ren’s eyes flickered briefly, opened, and he placed the palm of his left hand briefly against the imprint of Hux’s palm. They stared at each other for silent seconds until Hux turned sharply and left with a clicking of boot heels, leaving Ren to the numb, fuzzy mercies of drugged sleep and slow healing.


End file.
